There’s plenty I don’t fully agree with in Edmund King’s piece
but I do agree with the general tone and I think the fact that the President of the AA is making such a bold statement about cycle
infrastructure is very significant.

The point about cycle infrastructure really came home to me
over the weekend when I travelled through an army town in North Yorkshire –
Catterick Garrison. I spend a lot of time in North Yorkshire these days but not
much in Catterick. Outside of Catterick, provision for everyday, utility cycling is essentially non-existent. What you have is lots of incredibly fast, winding roads, plenty of space for a cycle track but you have to grin and bear it, mixing with lorries and people speeding to work and back. Not at all fun.

Amazingly, though, Catterick is criss-crossed by a grid of
wide, protected bike tracks that take you places you actually want to go.
There’s even a two mile off-road route along a disused railway to Richmond -
the nearest big town. It's more direct than the narrow, fast and winding main road that is the alternative route.

The bike tracks in Catterick have traffic signals to help
people cross major roads on their bikes. There are separate paths for
pedestrians and cyclists, even separate pedestrian and cyclist bridges. There
are (mostly) proper Dutch-style bike tracks that cross side roads as well. North Yorkshire council at one stage even toyed with the idea of closing some rural roads around the
town so that they are no longer through roads for motor vehicles but only for
bikes and pedestrians. This is the sort of thinking that is normal in the
Netherlands and almost unheard of in the UK.

Later that evening, I spoke with someone from Sustrans who
helped designed the bike grid. The army wanted its people to get about by bike,
so it ‘sliced through problems’, he advised, and paid for the bike grid, with a
little bit of help from North Yorkshire County Council and with advice from
Sustrans. The result? Over 15km of properly protected bike tracks that connect
residential areas with shops, schools and the rest of the garrison.

Clearly, with the right will and the right funding, the army
has bashed heads together and made a proper, safe, protected cycle grid.

No surprise there. Westminster MP Mark Field and Kensington
MP Malcolm Rifkind are seemingly very unsupportive. What’s good enough for the
army isn’t good enough for their Conservative voters, it seems. In that respect
(just to show I’m not being party political about it, my own local Labour MPKate Hoey is almost toxically anti-cycling).

I think the likes of Rifkind, Hoey and Field are living in
the past. I’m going to make a prediction that within five years, there will be
a couple of high-quality, long-distance protected bike tracks in central London
along major carriageways. But we might need the single-mindedness of the army
to ‘slice through problems’ and bash together the heads of reactionary,
conservative (of any political party) councillors and local MPs who want to subject
Londoners to more motor cars, more noise, more pollution, more road deaths, fewer
chances to cross the road and dying high streets choked with cars.

It’s time London started to change. I’m starting to think it
might just get there. If Boris Johnson can bash the heads of these MPs and
councillors together, I’d be very impressed indeed. But it’s still a very big ‘if’
at this stage.